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The next second he was frantically pulling at the door. I looked up to see what had spooked him, then started pulling on the other door. The ceiling was coming down. Not quickly, but quick enough to make us hurry. I held the doors while Pitr climbed out, then I threw him the bag and climbed out while he held the doors. Once back in the corridor, we let them go and they eased smoothly back together with a gentle thud. A few seconds later, the whirring noise from above got louder and closer, then stopped. Another hiss, and the doors started to slide open. Only not into the same room. This room was slightly smaller. The walls were a very pale brown, and now the light came from a circular strip in the ceiling.
Something made a chiming noise and the doors started to close. Without thinking, I reached out to stop them, but they moved back before my arm could actually made any contact. I looked at Pitr. He nodded and we stepped inside.
A waist-height handrail went all the way around the room with just a gap for the doors. Seconds after we stepped inside, the chime repeated and the doors started to close. This time we let them and, when we turned to watch, we saw a panel of buttons to the left of the door. I went over to study them, Pitr right behind me. A lot of them made no sense at all, but one or two were fairly obvious. A long column of buttons had numbers against them, from 0 to 15. A soft light shone behind the button marked ‘15’, which was at the bottom of the stack.
‘Any ideas?’ I asked.
Pitr shook his head slowly, still concentrating, then pointed at one of the buttons.
‘There are colours next to some of them.’
I looked more carefully. He was right. Little dots of colour, so small I had missed them. I scanned for and found a little dot of blue. It was next to the button marked ‘7’. I pushed it without asking. There was a whirr, and a strange feeling of being heavier for just a second. The floor trembled with an almost imperceptible vibration. Pitr pointed to the stack of buttons, and I saw that the light behind them was moving, and had already passed from 11 to 10.
The chime sounded again, the whirring faded, and for an instant I felt too light. The button marked ‘7’ lit up and the door opened again and onto a very different corridor. The floor was carpeted and the walls were pale blue with a subtle wavy pattern at just below head height. We stepped out of the ‘room’ and the doors hissed shut behind us.
‘Unexpected,’ I said, and Pitr nodded. I looked around without really looking. ‘Can you see the ribbon?’
It took us a moment to find what we thought was the ribbon buried inside the wavy pattern on the wall. Pitr turned to follow it, but I was looking at all the doors embedded in the corridor walls. Pitr actually took a few steps before stopping and looking over his shoulder at me.
‘Garret?’
‘Aren’t you curious?’ I asked. ‘There could be anything behind these.’
‘But we’re supposed to be getting to wherever your voice is sending us,’ Pitr protested.
‘I know,’ I said, walking over to the nearest door. There was a button next to the door, and a number inscribed on the button: 7/2243. I pressed it at exactly the same moment as Pitr said ‘Garret,’ in a horribly whiney voice that a baby would use when it couldn’t get its own way. There was an angry buzz and the black panel above the button lit up and showed the word ‘Unallocated’. I tried two more doors and got the same result. I gave up
‘Ready now,’ said Pitr, sounding superior and sarcastic. I didn’t say anything, I just started to follow the ribbon again. We followed it for what seemed like age, but then we started to notice cracks in the walls. Only small ones, but they were getting bigger. The floor covering got uneven, like little ripples, then it started to tear and showed something grey-black underneath. The corridor turned a corner, and we both stopped. Twenty metres ahead of us, the corridor vanished. Or, rather, a huge chunk of it did. We edged closer.
The ceiling went on about ten metres farther than the floor, and we could see the corridor ahead of us across a void. Curiously, the dark grey stuff the floor was made of seemed to go all the way across, but it sagged and twisted. When we got to the edge of the hole and could look out, we were near the top of a huge spherical void. Light spilled in from other broken corridors and I could just make out the different levels in the opposite walls. There were different bands of colour and texture, but things had run together like they had been melted.
‘Well now what do we do?’ said Pitr.
‘I suppose we could try to find a way around it,’ I said, but I was dubious. ‘It might take us a while, though. How much food did you bring?’
‘We have eight bars each left,’ Pitr replied, but I wasn’t listening. I had a message coming in.
‘Stay on the path.’
‘What? Have you seen - ?’
‘Stay on the path.’
And the message was over. Pitr was poking at my arm.
‘Did you hear me? I said we have - ’
‘It’s telling me to walk across,’ I said, interrupting.